King's Holiday Honors Values, Recalls Lessons

Although it's already three days gone, the older I get, the more I appreciate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Years ago, I abstained from the debate about creating yet another national holiday. I was torn between honoring a great man and the more practical effect of having schoolkids at home and slowing national productivity. No doubt these thoughts reflected my ethnic and socioeconomic cohort, which was mainstream, middle-class, pragmatic, Democratic and not racially sensitive.

But at this stage of life, the kids are no longer a problem, and my employer has delayed spring semester until after the holiday. This gives me more time to think about Dr. King's legacy. Ever so gradually, MLK Day has become my favorite secular holiday after Thanksgiving, in part because it's virtually immune from crass commercialization.

Memorial Day is always painful for me. Death with honor on the battlefield is still premature death. War remains the antithesis of peace. Presidents' Day celebrates the office, rather than the person. On it we celebrate titans like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, along with genocidal Andrew Jackson and criminal Richard Nixon.

Labor Day made perfect sense at the time when the powers of American political and corporate offices rode on the backs of workers in industry and commerce. Alas, most of our laborers have been outsourced overseas, and the old dichotomy of management vs. labor has metamorphosed into a blur. Halloween remains fun and Valentine's Day is still romantic, but both have been co-opted by retailers and compromised by rising anxiety about childhood safety and sugar-related health issues.

What's not to like about this list? About a national holiday during which all these words "rise up singing" above the blather, obscenity and violence of our daily media lives? Hearing them during the run-up to, and aftermath of MLK Day lifts my mood in surprising ways. On the day itself, I'm more proud to be a citizen of the United States than on any other secular holiday.

It was a blazing hot summer day in 1964. America was burning with racial riots in the wake of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Martin Luther King Jr. was about to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. I was 13, an age when — psychologists tell us — feelings about injustice are especially strong. I lived in Decatur, Ill., a racially divided city where my father was teaching that year. With little else to do, my friend and I decided to hang out in Woolworth's where a sign near the luncheon counter said we could have all the iced tea we wanted for a fixed price. So we paid up, stayed for a long time, and drank lots of tea.

At some point, the waitress pointed to the "All you can drink" sign and said: "that's all." We refused to leave. Some beefy guy escorted us out the door. We returned, bought some poster-board, made a picket sign and paraded back and forth in front of the store. A policeman showed up. Seeing his gun, we got into the patrol car. When it pulled into our driveway, my mother's alarm quickly gave way to embarrassment. I was punished accordingly.

This episode of youthful rebellion, police escort and undue punishment was trivial compared to what civil rights protesters were experiencing. Nevertheless, it paved the way to my challenges of arbitrary authority in high school during the late 1960s, my activism in student government during the early 1970s and a lifetime of mostly behind-the-scenes protestation.

In retrospect, Martin Luther King Jr. probably had more impact on my emerging sense of right and wrong than anyone else. In fact, I still stand for what he stood for: the inherent dignity and worth of every human being.